My Haunted House VI: Shades of Sinclair Lewis

                                     Sinclair Lewis exiting his Duluth house at 2601 E. Second Street

In 1985, I was writing an piece for the Minneapolis Star about Sauk Centre's celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of native son and Nobel-prize winning author, Sinclair Lewis. I felt connected to Lewis because my husband and I had recently acquired a bed from Lewis's Duluth house. My husband's parents had bought the bed when Lewis sold the house in 1946. They had eventually given it to a neighbor, and three decades later, the neighbor had offered it to us. We kept it. (In fact, I still have that bed and sleep in it every night.)

                                                             The bed today, back in Duluth

Big Lewis fans, we took occasional trips to Sauk Centre, 100 miles west of Minneapolis, to visit Lewis's boyhood home and see the Main Street that Lewis had made famous--or infamous--in his biting 1920 satirical novel of small town American life. We always stayed at the Palmer House Hotel, where Lewis had worked briefly as a teenager, and which then-owner Al Tingley declared to be haunted by a woman ghost. We'd visit Lewis's grave at Greenwood Cemetery outside of town. Satire aside, Sauk Centre was and still is an interesting historic Minnesota prairie town, thanks to Lewis's connection with it.

    In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Main Street #68 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels    of the 20th century. 

When we first acquired Lewis's Duluth bed in the late 1970s, I was awakened twice by what sounded like knocks on the headboard. My husband remained asleep and didn't hear them. He, unlike the other three members of the family, didn't experience firsthand any of the presumably paranormal incidents in the house.

In 1985, the south room on the third floor of our house was my writing room. I typed the article about the Lewis centenary on a library table that was set against the wall with two slide-up windows. While writing, I had propped open the window next to the table with a short length of two-by-four board. I worked all afternoon, finally finishing just before dinner time. Ripping the last page from the typewriter roll, I exclaimed, "Done! How do you like that, Red?' As I said "Red", the window slammed shut, scaring me silly. Did Lewis like it? I hope so.

                                                    The south room in the mid-1980s

Mark Schorer, when he was researching his 1961 biography of Lewis, said that he felt constantly "haunted" by Lewis. Schorer felt that Lewis, who had died in 1951, was dogging him, pressuring him to dig up more details about his life. 

    "Sinclair Lewis: An American Life will stand for years to come in the select company of definitive                                                            American biographies."--Amazon Books

Indeed, Schorer's description of Lewis's funeral on a record-cold winter day in Sauk Centre in 1951 has some spooky details--for example, store windows on Main Street cracked from the intense cold, the only time that that has happened. When the mourners got to the cemetery, they left their cars' engines running, fearing that they wouldn't be able to re-start them. Lewis's brother Claude carried the urn containing his ashes to the grave site. It was bitterly cold and completely still. Claude decided (Lewis would have loved this) that the urn was too good to bury, so he removed the cover and proceeded to pour the ashes into the ground. At that point, a huge gust of wind suddenly swept over the grave site and "blew old Red over twenty acres of Stearns County," as one observer put it.

                                                Lewis's grave marker in Greenwood Cemetery 

                                                    *                            *                            *

One incident that happened in that same room on the third floor stands out as different from all the rest. It probably had nothing to do with Lewis, but it was the one-and-only time I experienced a nocturnal paranormal visitor.  

Because I didn't want to be awakened when my husband had to get up at 4:30, I decided to sleep in the bed on the third floor. Around 3 a.m., I was awakened by sensing a man coming into the room and coming to stand over me at the right side of the bed. I turned over to ask why I had been awakened. I opened my eyes--and saw in the dim illumination from the streetlight that no one was in the room. I immediately got up and went to the top of the stairs, preparing to call out. But the stairwell was pitch dark, and the door at the bottom was closed; all was dead-still in the house. 

The thought screamed in my head. "Ghost!" Curiously, instead of being freaked out, I returned to bed and immediately fell asleep. It was almost as if I'd been drugged. The next day when I asked the rest of family if any of them had come up to the third floor during the night, they all said no. Was it Frank--or maybe Red, wondering why I was not in the Lewis bed on the second floor? We'll never know. I never slept in that room again, although my daughter M did when it became her room. She had no nocturnal visitors.

After that experience, I recalled that a Minneapolis woman had told me of a similar reaction that she had when she was awakened by an apparition while she was house sitting. Sensing a presence, she woke up and saw a woman standing across the room, staring at her. She looked at the figure, who was clearly unhappy with her presence, then immediately fell back into a deep sleep. This happened three times until she learned from the owner of the house that the ghost was a deceased previous owner, the protective spirit of the house. (Like Frank, I might add.)

                                                    *                            *                            *

"Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else: we can bore people long after we are dead." ~ Sinclair Lewis

My Haunted House V: Circuits and Psychics

Besides the footsteps, bangs, and opening doors, we also experienced electrical anomalies in the house.  One evening in the late 1980s, after dinner my younger daughter M decided to go fetch her homework from her room. Our border collie Minnie, who usually followed her around the house, however, balked at going up to the second floor with her, and M had an uneasy feeling as well. She went upstairs, turned on the light in her room and hastened in to grab her homework when poof! the overhead light turned off, leaving M in the dark. Frightened, M ran right out and down the stairs and breathlessly told me about the light turning off on its own.  I was so sure that the bulb had burned out that I took a new one upstairs. But when I flipped the switch, the light turned on. The switch had moved from on to off by itself. M, validated, gave me an I-told-you-so look. 

 The former upstairs kitchen after it had been restored as a guest room. 

Eventually, it became M's room.

Around the same time, flashing around the main chimney had come loose, and rainwater had begun leaking onto third floor landing, which was over the one lighting fixture in the second floor hallway. The narrow, dark hallway ran the length of the house from the foyer staircase to the bathroom and stairs to the third floor at the back end. The hanging fixture with a painted glass shade and its wall switch were at the mid-point, and you had to walk halfway down the hallway in the dark to turn it on. There was one electrical outlet and only one small nine-light window next to the stairwell door. As a precaution against shorts until the chimney leak was fixed, I disconnected the power to the hallway light.

One night, my daughter Ceridwen awoke in the wee hours. Through the open door of her bedroom she saw that a light was flickering off and on in the hallway, as if the electrical connection was faulty or the bulb was malfunctioning. She turned over and went back to sleep. Only until later that night, when she was walking down the dark hallway to the bathroom, did it occur to her that the power to the fixture had been disconnected and the bulb removed.

Not just lights turned on by themselves. In January of 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, killing all seven crew members aboard. The crew's family members watching the Challenger rise into the sky and the hundreds of thousands of people watching on TV were stunned and horrified when it blew up right before their eyes. Throughout that day and the next week the TV networks played the video of the disaster over and over again.  I found the media's obsession with this horrific event upsetting and avoided watching the news.

                                           

                                                              The Challenger exploding.

Two nights after the disaster, about an hour after I had gone to bed, all of a sudden, from Ceridwen's room came the sound of a newscast blaring. I got out of bed and looked into Ceridwen's room. There, on her little portable TV, was the CNN video of the explosion! Ceridwen was sitting up in bed staring at the TV screen. Obviously, she hadn't turned it on. We speculated about how it could have come on, but couldn't determine a cause. In the end, I pulled the plug on the TV and went back to bed.  Fortunately, no other disturbances occurred that night, nor did the TV ever turn on by itself again. (Two decades later there were other electrical shenanigans in that room, but that's for another post.)

One day in 1990, Ceridwen and a few friends were hanging out in the dining room when the overhead chandelier began turning sporadically off and on. The friends knew about Frank, and indeed a couple of them had heard Frank walking around when they came to take care of the pets. Naturally, they and Ceridwen blamed Frank for the light flickering, but for practical reasons, I needed to find out if the cause was physical.

Over the next week, the dining room light turned off and on several times, and I decided to call Northern States Power to check out the connection to the electrical box. A guy came out, examined it, and declared that the connection was good.  So I called an electrician to see if he could find the problem. He came and checked the house wiring, but could find nothing wrong. In desperation, I turned to a psychic medium.

 Her name was Judith Dale, and she worked out of Sunsight Books at Lake and Lyndale. The three of us greeted her at the door as she arrived carrying a large piece of crystal. I had, and still have reservations about most self-proclaimed psychics, but Judith came highly recommended, so I developed a wait-and-see attitude. I got far more than I anticipated from the outcome of her visit.

                                                                        A quartz crystal
 

Judith began by walking through the parlors and kitchen to the back door, holding the crystal before her. She went to the electrical box, and saying nothing, reversed course and went up the front stairs. I waited expectantly to see if she'd mention Frank, but she didn't. Instead, she stopped in the front bedroom, Ceridwen's room. She said that she felt a strong negative energy in the room--not an active haunting, but something residual. Judith said that the room had been a "discipline" room for children and that their emotions still pervaded the room.

                                       Young Ceridwen in her first bedroom, the small room over the foyer.

Judith asked Ceridwen if she had any experiences of this energy. I was flabbergasted when Ceridwen told her that as a pre-school child, she had sometimes seen a boy and girl in the room when we first moved into the house. This revelation took me aback because I remembered Ceridwen talking about seeing "Girl and Boy", never realizing that they were not imaginary playmates, but full-bodied, full-color apparitions. Recently, Ceridwen told me that she vividly remembers what they both looked like, a boy around six and his slightly older sister. She not only saw them in her room, but in other parts of the house, most frequently on the third floor. 

As M and I stood out in the hallway at the door to the room watching, Judith laid her hands on Ceridwen  and uttered words to release the spiritual energy trapped there. As she concluded the ritual with a blessing, a most extraordinary thing occurred: M and I felt a blast of energy pour through the door, almost like an electrical charge. As the wave of energy rushed past us, the overhead light in the room turned on for one beat, then went off. The wave only lasted a moment, and was gone. After that, a deep sense of peace settled around us, an unforgettable sensation.

        Haley Joel Osment as the kid who "sees dead people' in the 1999 film "The Sixth Sense"

We accompanied Judith to the front door. The experience of the cleansing had been so intense, I had almost forgotten about Frank and the light. 

"What about the problem with the light?" I asked. 

"Oh, that," Judith replied. "There's a loose connection to the electrical box. Call NSP to come and fix it." 

 Thunderstruck, I told her that someone had come and found nothing amiss. 

"Call them back," she said, "and insist that they send someone out again. Don't take no for an answer."

I called NSP. They resisted my pleas to send a second person, but finally gave in when I told them that an electrician could find nothing wrong with the house wiring. I did not mention Judith.

Anyway, they did send a second technician who, as Judith predicted, found a loose connection and repaired it.

In the end, Judith's visit fixed two energy problems: the loose wire and Girl and Boy. And Frank, in this case, was acquitted.

                                        *                                           *                                          *

    Houdini in the Magic Box, c. 1924. He delighted in debunking mediums. (Photo: Library of Congress)

A word about psychic mediums: I am very skeptical of the claims of most psychics. You see them investigating on ghost-hunting programs, and they are never at a loss for "impressions"--which of course, can't be verified objectively. Worse yet, I encountered a storefront psychic in New York City whose main goal was to do a cashectomy on her clients, a common objective of commercial "psychics." Scary.

Nevertheless, in my collecting of ghost stories, I came across three Twin Cities psychic mediums who proved to be the Real Thing: Judith Dale, Echo Bodine, and Eve Olson. 

Although I have never met Echo, a half dozen people told me fascinating stories of her readings. In a blog post, I've recounted one story of her visit to an 1890's house in the Healy Block Historical District: 

'Shortly after Dan acquired the house, he invited celebrated psychic Echo Bodine in for a tour. She told him that the lower floors had residual hauntings, but nothing active. On the other hand, on the third floor “lived” a little boy ghost, an intelligent haunting. Echo told Dan that the boy had said to her, “Dan doesn’t see me, but Newton does.” This freaked out Dan because Newton was his cat’s name–and the psychic didn’t know that.'

The late Eve Olson was a Spiritualist minister from England who lived in St. Paul in the 1980s. As a minister, she did not charge for readings, although she would accept donations to the church. One evening I brought several of my neighbors to her house for a reading.  When she asked, "Is there a [man's name] here?", a man with that name dutifully identified himself. 

She told him that an older man in soiled overalls wearing a straw hat was sending him greetings. "He's smiling, holding up his right hand, showing that the index finger is missing." 

The man blanched. "That's my Uncle Jack!" he said. "He was a farmer who had lost a finger in a corn picker. He died several years ago."

We were amazed. None present besides myself had met Eve until that evening, and she knew nothing about any of them.

Go figure.

My Haunted House IV: Footsteps and Big Bangs

By far the most active period for weird happenings at the house were the 1980s. After the grate incidents in 1983, the family experienced some more common sorts of paranormal activity: sounds.

One morning I returned to the house after walking my daughter M to the elementary school down the block. I unlocked the door and stepped into the foyer--and heard heavy footsteps in the upper hallway. I knew right away that no flesh-and-blood person was upstairs. As I looked up the foyer staircase, the footsteps stopped. I ran upstairs and looked through all the rooms, but as I expected, no one was there. 

                                              The Eastlake design doorknob on the front door.

Later that year, I had returned once again from walking M to school one morning and was collecting laundry in the upstairs bedrooms when I heard the front door open. No knock. No sound of the deadbolt turning. But as clear as day, for several seconds, I heard the sound of the latch on the heavy ash door being released, the door swinging open, and the ambient sounds from the street. I called out, but no one answered. I then went to the foyer staircase and looked down. To my amazement, the door was shut and locked.

By this time, we had decided that the most likely candidate for who was causing these manifestations was Frank M. Cartwright. As I mentioned in Part II, Frank lived in the house from 1910 until his death in 1936. For much of that time he worked at the house, running his tack and livery business from what was then the barn. 

                                            

                                              A Cartwright family photo of the barn, c. 1915.              

                                                           Frank M. Cartwright, 1866-1836

                                        Part of the horse tack we found in the former barn.

When she visited the house in 1977, Frank's daughter Helen Ruth Kinney was aghast to see how the house had changed since when her parents owned it. During the Depression, they had duplexed the house, but had made minimal changes--locks installed on the foyer doors and a sink and shelves installed in the bedroom over the dining room to make an upstairs kitchen. When she and her brother sold the house in 1941, it looked much as it had when it was built. 

But by the time we acquired it in 1976, all--and I do mean all--of the woodwork had been painted, some ceilings lowered, the Victorian framework and mirrors over the fireplace removed, the fretwork spandrels taken down, and the original fixtures removed. The walls of the dining room, for example, had been painted Pepto-Bismol pink with a purple ceiling, and a "flying saucer" light that you could pull up and down had been installed over the table area. The hardwood floors were in a deplorable condition. The exterior had been sheathed in two layers of siding: "insulbrick", fiberboard sheathing covered with tar and granular material, and above that, asbestos shakes. All of the exterior and interior ornament had been removed.

                  Removing the layers of siding, 1977. Asphalt siding was under the asbestos shakes.

We had decided that Frank was the one haunting the place because: A. The ghost was obviously male. B. The activity started after we had completed the exterior restoration and had begun the interior restoration.

Helen Ruth Kinney also told us how her family loved parties. She had been a professional singer before she married, and when she and her husband homesteaded in northern Alberta, they hauled an upright piano with them. On Christmas week neighbors would come from miles around to sing, dance, and be merry around their piano. 

                                               

                                          Helen Ruth in costume for one of her singing roles

We liked music and parties, too. Every year from the early 1980s from when I sold the house in 2017, I would hold a party on the Winter Solstice.

The Winter Solstice party and carol sing was held each year on the solstice itself, whatever the weather or day of the week. Guests would bring holiday treats to share, and a large pot of glögg (Swedish mulled wine, very potent) and another of apple cider would be simmering on the stove. After socializing for an hour or so, the guests would assemble in the parlors for a short program of readings of the season--for example, Wallace Stevens' "The Snow Man", Thomas Hardy's "The Oxen", Clement Moore's "'Twas the Night Before Christmas," or a humorous holiday story. 

After that, people would arrange themselves around the tree and baby grand piano in the front parlor for the carol sing. Since many attendees were from the St. David's (Welsh) Society, we'd sing carols and songs in English and a few in Welsh in four-part harmony. We'd sing all the favorites, as well as some unfamiliar ones, always ending with "Silent Night" in English and then in German.

                  Singing around the tree, Solstice Party 2014, with David Evan Thomas at the piano.

Most years, 15-25 people would show up to celebrate the solstice. One solstice night in the mid-1990s Minneapolis was hit with a big snowstorm. By the time the party started, the ground was already covered with several inches of heavy, wet snow. Nevertheless, four diehards from the St. David's Society managed to get the house. Few cars and pedestrians were out and about.

Around 9:30, we were gathered around the piano in the front parlor singing Welsh Plygain carols when we heard someone come up onto the porch. The sound of someone wearing heavy boots came to the front door. Then silence. We expected whoever it was to come in through the unlocked door, but nothing happened.  

                                                  The front porch, decorated for Christmas.

All of us heard the footsteps, but we couldn't see anyone out the front window. I got up from the piano, went into the foyer, and opened the front door. Not only was no one there, but the drifted snow on the porch was unmarked by footprints. The others came and looked out, too. They were thunderstruck. Who or what had walked across the porch? Was that Frank letting us know he was coming to the party? I think so.

                                      The restored fireplace mantel in the front parlor, Christmas 1981

In 1991, inspired by the PBS TV series "The Civil War', we threw a party around that theme. Four people, including me, whose ancestors had served in the war told their family stories, and then we had various musicians sing and play songs from that era. The house was packed with guests. Before the concert began, several people were in the front parlor talking as we waited for the trumpet player, Colin, to arrive. (Coincidentally, the trumpeter was one of the teenagers who had heard footsteps when he came to feed the animals.) 

I was talking to my friend Mitzi in the front parlor when we heard the sound of boots coming onto the porch and crossing to the door. Those in the front room all heard the footsteps. "That's got to be Colin," I said, getting up and going into the foyer. But again, when I opened the door, no one was there. Mitzi was freaked out, as she clearly had heard the footsteps, as had the others. I suspected that it was party-loving, music-loving Frank who had once again made his arrival known.

Frank came to another solstice carol sing in 2015. At least I think so. We were singing around the piano, when a loud "bang" reverberated through the wall where the front door was located. Again, we looked out to see if anyone was at the door, but of course, there was no one.

The next year on Halloween Eve, there was another loud bang, this time from the back of the house. By then, the summer kitchen had been converted to an all-season room, with three windows looking out onto the back yard and a door with a window. From my Facebook post that day: 

"A curious incident this evening. It's 5:40 p.m. and I'm stirring the soup pot in the kitchen. Suddenly, a loud pounding sounds at the back door--three quick bangs like a fist striking the storm door. Viggo jumps up barking, and we both hurry to the door. There must be an emergency--garage on fire, someone hurt? I look through the window. No one is there. I quickly open the door. The gates are closed and latched. I go out and look around the yard, up on the roof, then come in and look in the basement. Nothing is disturbed or changed inside and outside. All is quiet. WTF?"

                                              The front window, decorated for Halloween, 2009
 

In 2017, the year after the second big bang, after I had bought my house in Duluth and was preparing to move, another loud bang rocked the house. But I'll wait till we get to that part of the story to tell you the details.

My Haunted House III: Lemme Outta Here!

Note: A couple of the incidents I'll be describing have been mentioned in previous posts in this blog. Rather than referring you to these posts, for the sake of continuity, I will be describing these incidents again in this series.

                                *                              *                               *                              * 

 

                         The house with the first paint colors after restoration. The original colors were               pea-green siding with yellow-gold trim.

Within months of the grate moving, another curious incident transpired when the family was out of town. Family friend Lucy was staying at the house while we had driven to Pittsburgh to visit relatives.

One day she returned to the house after work and found the front door wide open. Alarmed, Lucy went inside and checked all the rooms.  She found that burglars had broken in at the back of the house through the flimsy pine door to the summer kitchen. (This was when the summer kitchen was an unheated addition.) Nothing was disturbed on the first floor, but on the second floor in the master bedroom, Lucy found two dresser drawers pulled out and their contents dumped on the floor. A jewelry box containing some costume jewelry was missing, with a few pieces strewn on the stairs, in the foyer, and on the front porch. Cash and a watch belonging to Lucy that were clearly visible in the guest room were untouched.

                                            The entrance to the summer kitchen at the back of the house                                                                   before conversion to an all-season room.

The break-in had probably lasted only a few minutes. Why were these burglars in such a rush to flee that they left the front door open? Why did they risk running out the front door in broad daylight, where neighbors or passersby might see them? Why did they open only a couple of drawers before quitting?

The answer: They thought that someone was home. Did they hear footsteps coming down the stairs from the third floor? Were there sounds of someone moving around in the parlors or dining room? Whatever happened, it seems obvious that the thieves were in a big hurry to get out of there, choosing to escape through the front, rather than retracing their steps to the back. 

During the 'Eighties friends of my daughter Ceridwen who came to the house to take care of our pets when we were out of town had stories to tell about their encounters with an unseen resident--perhaps the same resident who had scared off the burglars. Six of these friends had similar stories to tell (and this is important), not knowing about the others' stories. Four girls related how after hearing heavy footsteps on the second floor as they were feeding the pets in the kitchen, they couldn't wait to get out of the house.

                                                         The front staircase after restoration.

The two teenage boys who had come to tend to the animals were completely freaked out by their experience. In the words of one of them:

"We went in to feed the dog. We went upstairs to feed the bird. It was really cold out. We heard the front door open. A blast of cold air came in. We thought you guys had come home early from your trip. We shouted down the staircase [that] it was us. We heard someone slowly walk up the stairs. We waited and spoke toward the sound. We crept toward the stop of the stairs. . .There was nothing there.

The door was wide open.

I am agnostic, but this was a huge event in my spiritual formation."

                                                       The front porch entry in winter.

Only one other break-in attempt occurred while I lived there--again via the back--but my dog Viggo stopped the would-be burglar and scared him off. Fortunately, thanks to Viggo, the ghost with the heavy boots did not have to put in an appearance.

My Haunted House II: Researching who Lived in the House

If you think your home might be haunted, to find out who might be haunting it, you have two main options: 1) Hire a psychic 2) Hire a house historian.  For us, the advantage of the second option was that even before the grate incident, my then-husband, Anders Christensen, had already done extensive research on our house.

In a nutshell, he discovered that the house was built in 1885 by master builder Charles J. Buell. A native of New York, Buell built his first three houses in the Lowry Hill East neighborhood. Our house was his third, constructed for what was at the time the princely sum of $5,100. Buell went on to build 27 more houses, most of them in St. Paul, but is best remembered in Minnesota for his history of the legislature.

                                  Buell's image on the title page of his book seems rather sinister.

House historians like Jim Sazevich of St. Paul are sometimes contacted by people trying to find out who or what is causing strange occurrences in their house. For example, one St. Paul couple who had recently bought an historic house, called him because of disruptions in the library of their new home. When they moved in, they set up the library with their books. One afternoon when they returned to the house, they had a hard time pushing open the door to the library. When they got it open, they discovered that books had been taken off the shelves and hurled helter-skelter around the room, with a pile blocking the door. At first they thought that vandals had broken in, but after this had happened several times, they decided to call in Jim.

However interesting the research on Buell was to us, after I suspected that something paranormal was going on, our focus turned to the owners and other occupants of the house over the years. Of these, two stood out as possibilities: the second family who lived in the house, the McCormicks, and the family that owned the house from 1912 to 1941, the Cartwrights.

The McCormicks caught our attention because Ellen, the wife of William E. McCormick, who bought the house in 1888, died in the house. According to her death certificate, in June of that year 24-year-old Ellen died in the house of "heart disease" lasting only one day. Three years later, William married Mary Heckman, listed as the housekeeper for the family, and in 1892, the family moved to the Pacific Northwest. Ellen is buried at Lakewood Cemetery, and we would visit her grave, wondering what really caused her death and wondering what Mary's role as "housekeeper" actually entailed.

. 

                                                                  Ellen's death certificate

The Cartwrights owned the house longer than any previous owners. Frank M. Cartwright leased the house in 1910. In 1912, Cartwright and his wife Gertrude bought the house. Cartwright ran a livery and tack business out of the barn, catering to the horse owners who stabled their equines in the nearby horse barn. At that time, people would ride around Lake of the Isles and the other city lakes in the summer, and take sleighs out on the frozen lakes in winter. Frank died in 1936, Gertrude in 1941. Their children, Dana and Helen Ruth, sold it the next year.

We were fortunate enough to be able to track down Helen Ruth Cartwright Kinney, then in her 80s, who visited the house, told us family stories, and gave us old photos of herself, the family, and the house. In fact, it was the photos of house taken in 1914 that allowed us to restore the exterior to its original appearance in 1978. (The interior restoration took much longer.)

                                                            Gertrude Cartwright, c. 1910

As it turned out, Ellen was soon eliminated as the likely haunter when it became clear that the person haunting the house was male. Frank Cartwright then moved to the top of the list of likely culprits.

Of course, after you find a likely candidate for who's haunting your house, this still may not explain why. One theory that explains a haunting that occurs when new owners make changes to the property is that the ghost is reacting to these changes--and we had made significant changes. In many cases, the reaction is a negative one, but not always. We would have to wait until more incidents took place before we came to any conclusions.

My Haunted House I : Something's Happening Here

                   "There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear."

Steven Still's song isn't about the paranormal, but this quote quite aptly describes what many people think after they witness something that seems unexplainable.

1978 was a banner year for my family. It marked the completion of the exterior restoration of our 1885 Queen Anne house begun the previous summer and the birth of a second daughter in July. In September I interviewed several neighbors about ghostly-goings on in their homes, and then wrote them up in an article for the Wedge newspaper. (Read the article here: "Enter Ghost" "Enter Ghost" Wedge 1978.) 

These interviews led to other interviews and other articles. I talked to Eleanor Steckert, Professor of Folklore at the University of Minnesota, and read the books she suggested. The first was the 1981 classic by Jan Harald Brundvand, The Vanishing Hitchhiker: America's Urban Legends and their Meanings. I learned that a folklorist does not need to believe in nor try to disprove the claims in the stories they collect. The important thing is to listen, record, and document. Thus I became not a ghost hunter, but a ghost story collector.

In The Vanishing Hitchhiker, Brunvand says that the hitchhiker story is the one he's heard most often in his collecting of urban legends: 

Someone driving at night sees a girl (or guy) by the roadside in distress. They offer her a ride to her home. After they drop her off, they realize that she's left her sweater/umbrella/purse/whatever behind. They go back to the house. When her mother answers the door, she get very upset and tells them that her daughter is long dead. 

There are a number of variations on this story, but they all present the girl or guy as a solid apparition that can be touched, one that leaves physical evidence behind. In fact, I heard variations on this story from two people, one from Georgia and one from New England, stories that they had heard from other people. My daughter Ceridwen heard a Christian version of this, with the hitchhiker as Jesus.

So much for urban legends. But what about firsthand accounts of spooky encounters? These are what I was interested in. Then, in 1983, something happened at our house that intrigued and baffled me. I was in the foyer talking on the phone, and my younger daughter, whom I'll call "M," was in the back parlor, when I heard a loud, metallic "clunk" in the dining room. I immediately opened the door to the dining room and saw, to my astonishment, that the cast iron floor grate had moved from its place against the wall to the rug under the table. Our dog Tessie was standing several feet away near the kitchen doorway, staring at the grate with a "WTF?" look on her face.

How did the louvered grate move a couple of feet on its own? I asked M if she had moved the grate, and she emphatically denied it. She had been sitting on the sofa watching TV in the adjoining parlor. We moved the grate several times from the floor to the rug in an effort to determine what could have moved it. We tested how much force it took to move the nine-pound grate from the floor to the rug. There's no way Tessie could have moved the grate. The openings were big enough only to fit fingers, not large dog paws. The air from the forced-air furnace could barely lift a piece of paper, let alone move a heavy grate.

I applied Occam's Razor: The simplest explanation is the best one. At that point, I had heard enough stories to recognize the elements of paranormal activity. Did a ghost move the grate? If so, who was it that wanted to get our attention? It would take a few more incidents over many months and more research to come to some sort of a conclusion.

                                                   The front parlor of our house in 1981

Months passed. Then one afternoon, my younger daughter, M, was by herself in the house, upstairs watching TV in her room over the dining room when she heard a metallic clunk from the first floor. After having witnessed the moving of the grate previously, she recognized the sound. Fearing the worst, she crept downstairs and looked into the dining room. There it was: The grate had once again moved from its place in the floor to the rug. When her father came inside shortly thereafter, he found M nearly hysterical with fear. M had heard me declare my suspicions that the movement was possibly caused by a ghost, and the grate moving again freaked her out.

Witnessing the grate moving was significant, as it was a clear physical manifestation of an unexplainable force. Hearing footsteps, seeing apparitions--these common paranormal incidents are ephemeral and hard to document. Someone wanted to get our attention--and did. The grate never moved again, but it marked the beginning of a decade of sporadic unexplained incidents in the house which I will describe in my next posts.

                                                     

Do You Believe in Ghosts?

                                        Edith Wharton at her writing desk, 1905 (Photo: NYTimes)

American author and designer Edith Wharton (1862-1937) wrote a very scary collection of literary ghost stories, Ghosts, reissued in 2021. I was intrigued by Wharton's answer to the question, "Do you believe in ghosts?" in the preface to this collection: “I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m afraid of them.”

                           The cover of a first edition copy of Ghosts. You can have it for $2,500.

In her biography, Life and I, published posthumously, Wharton explains that this fear of ghosts emerged after she read a ghost story during convalescence from an illness at the age of nine: "To an unimaginative child the tale would no doubt have been harmless, . . .[but] with my intense Celtic sense of the super-natural, tales of robbers & ghosts were perilous reading.” Wharton, thanks to reading this story, entered "a world haunted by formless horrors.” She continued to be "haunted' into adulthood, even though she had no paranormal experiences--only the experience of reading about ghosts.

I understand how this could happen. When I was 16, I read a collection of ghost stories from New England folklore, and got scared senseless--for a week. Then, as the memory of these tales faded, ghosts went off my radar for a couple of decades. (Obviously, I do not have Wharton's powerful imagination.) Then, coming to the realization that my family and I were living in a proverbial haunted Victorian house, ghosts were brought to my attention again. However, after experiencing quite a few inexplicable events over the years, my daughters and I became more nonplussed than scared. (I plan to write up these experiences in future blog posts.)  When I heard footsteps or witnessed a TV turning on in the middle of the night, my reaction was not, "Aieee!", but "WTF?" On the other hand, some of my daughter's friends who came to check on our pets when we were out of town understandably got freaked out when they heard footsteps in the upper hallway when no one was there.

                     A ghost photoshopped into an image of a staircase in a wrecked Minneapolis mansion.

A couple who told me very scary stories about their haunted house (where I, too, had a ghostly experience), when asked, said they did not believe in ghosts. Perhaps denying their existence made it easier to cope with the very strange goings-on. My father, who also was not a believer, nevertheless told stories about his experiences in the auditorium in Woodlawn School and stories about a fellow actor who haunted the old Pittsburgh Playhouse. My Aunt Estella, another non-believer, told me of an eerie experience on the death of a relative. 

Some non-believers are willing to suspend disbelief to hear a good story; other non-believers scoff at and ridicule believers. ("She must have been drunk", "He's a nutcase," etc.) Others just don't care one way or the other.

Of course, many believers who have not had any paranormal experiences desperately want to believe. They watch TV programs about "investigations"; they go to allegedly haunted locations to see if they can have an experience. Many don't have experiences, and some, I suspect, want to believe so badly that they start "seeing things."

                                                    An old wing in Eastern State Penitentiary

I have never been to a Halloween haunted house, but I have visited one of the allegedly most haunted locations in the US, Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. On a lovely summer day my friend Jay-Louise and I did a tour of this historic prison, where inmates once lived in horrific conditions. We'd heard some of the ghost stories about this place; we learned the history as we walked through its corridors. If a place should be haunted, Eastern State should be. We didn't have any paranormal experiences, but I admit to getting the heebie-jeebies in some of the cells and walkways in this crumbling, dark edifice. 

I have been to other places that creeped me out, most recently a house on a architectural tour. As I walked through the house, I felt more and more uneasy, but said nothing. It had a nasty odor. The rooms seemed dark, even on that sunny day. As we hastily exited, my companion commented, "I couldn't wait to get out of that place. Horrible!" An earlier visitor had a similar experience, going so far as to say that the house should be torn down. Others, however, thought the house was cool. Who's to say?

Duluth's "Haunted Ship", the William A. Irvin. Is it really haunted? You can try to find out for yourself during one of the October "Haunted" tours.

If you haven't had any ghostly encounters, but want to experience them in their most intense forms, I recommend reading literary ghost stories. You can get thrills and chills from the comfort of your home by reading Wharton's "Old Souls", Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw," or Ellen Glasgow's "Jordan's End"--or so many others from Dickens to Shakespeare. 

                 Macbeth sees Banquo's ghost (although no one else does) Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 4

MACBETH, to the Ghost 
Avaunt, and quit my sight! Let the earth hide thee.
Thy bones are marrowless; thy blood is cold;
Thou hast no speculation in those eyes
Which thou dost glare with.

 

Leave the lights on.